


Too Much, Too Late

by Lyss2011



Series: The Pensieve [1]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Harry Potter Fusion, Harry Potter References, Immortal Merlin, Pensieves, Waiting for Arthur Pendragon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-17 16:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16520315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyss2011/pseuds/Lyss2011
Summary: If only he could stop himself from remembering, if only he could lock the memories into a dungeon, he could get on with his life, such as it was.





	Too Much, Too Late

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the prompt: https://kinksofcamelot.livejournal.com/1806.html?thread=485902#t485902
> 
> Title unintentionally from Ed Sheeran's _Don't_ but still works

Merlin sighed. He had to stop thinking about Arthur. It had been two hundred – no, almost three hundred – years since his king had died, and his brain was still bombarding him with the memories. The memory of holding Arthur in his arms as he died was particularly painful. The more he remembered, the more convinced he became that his relationship with Arthur could have been more. And he remembered every day. It was too late for these realizations, but his brain didn't seem to care.

If only he could stop himself from remembering, if only he could lock the memories into a dungeon, he could get on with his life, such as it was. There were just too many memories. The mind was never meant to hold hundreds of years’ worth of knowledge and memories, and he was sure that soon he’d go mad. 

He sighed again. It was time to go to bed; he would look at his spell books again tomorrow to find a spell to remove unwanted memories. At the very least he could get rid of his memory of the years he spent as a hermit. Except – there was something stuck to his fingertips, long and shimmery, glowing in the candlelight. A unicorn hair? No, he didn’t have any of that in his stores, and his hand had been nowhere near the jars he kept on the edge of the messy table. In fact, now that he thought about it, his hand had been twisted in his hair as it usually was when he started thinking about Arthur. So this had come from – his head? Was he finally going grey after living for almost three hundred years?

Merlin hesitantly touched the possible grey hair with his other hand, and felt his fingers tingle with magic. Not normal hair then. He started to gently set the hair on his work table, but when he set it down it seemed to melt into a puddle. Some kind of liquid hair then? He wasn’t sure. 

He searched around for a clean bowl, still keeping an eye on the silvery substance dangling from his fingers to make sure he didn’t lose it in the meantime. He gently lowered the whatever-it-was into the bowl, shaking his hand lightly to rid it of the substance.

Merlin tilted the bowl slowly, noting on a spare bit of parchment that it acted like something between a liquid and a vapor in the bowl. It was still silvery and glowing brightly, swirling even a minute after Merlin had set the bowl down. Merlin took a moment to apologize to Gaius’ spirit for being so rash before poking the surface of the substance with his finger. 

It wasn’t like he could die anyway.

The surface instantly changed and showed a dragons-eye view of a clearing in a wood, with two figures huddled together. It was too small to really make anything else out, but he had a strange feeling that it should be familiar to him. After a moment, the scene disappeared and the silvery glow was back.

Merlin stared at it for a moment, thinking, and then snapped his fingers. “Yes!” he exclaimed to his empty home. “I need a larger bowl.”

The larger bowl – his cooking pot, actually – did make the image larger, but it was still too small for him to make out what was happening. The only details he got were that one figure was in silver – armor probably – and the other was wearing brown. The longer he stared at it though, something changed. A much larger figure – so large Merlin could identify it – flew into the image and landed next to the figures. It was a dragon, and looked very similar to Kilgharrah. 

As far as Merlin knew, his friend had been dead for centuries, there was no way the real Kilgharrah was trapped inside this substance. Right? He began pacing, trying to sort it all out. 

It was while he was thinking of Kilgharrah and everything he knew about the end of the dragon's life that everything went wrong. There was a crash and a squawk and he turned just in time to see his owl Archimedes disappear into the still-swirling spilled liquid as if a portal to another world was opened just for his pet.

“NO!” he screamed, throwing himself onto the floor, shards of broken glass be damned. His owl companions had kept him company for the past few decades, and Archimedes himself was only six months old. 

He reached into the liquid in a vain attempt to grab Archimedes from wherever he’d gone but his palm hit the ground instead, some of the liquid splashing over the back of his hand, clearly showing the scene again. He was really worried now; this was just confirmation that Kilgharrah and Archimedes and two humanoid figures were stuck somewhere, and the only link to this world appeared to be through this liquid. 

Merlin clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to remember how Archimedes fell into the liquid. His pet was far less clumsy than himself, so he probably didn’t go wing-first. He would have landed in it feet first, curious about the bright light coming from the substance. So he got up and took off his boot and sock and stuck his toe in, bracing himself to fall through the portal it opened up. Except – his toe hit the ground as well. Well shit. It was time for Plan B but he had no idea what that would be.

He was lacing his boot back up in defeat when the substance spit Archimedes back out, the owl flapping his wings to steady himself. Merlin carefully checked over the owl but didn’t find any physical damage. He reluctantly let him out to hunt for the night and sat down to write some further notes and speculations about the glowing puddle on his floor.

*

Merlin sat up and peeled a piece of parchment off his face. He must’ve fallen asleep in the middle of writing because he was still holding the quill and there was a line across the lower half of the parchment. It reminded him of the times he had to wake Arthur after a night of speech-writing, some of the words inevitably smudged from Arthur’s drool. Speaking of Arthur, it seemed that this new mystery substance was finally what he’d needed to stop having dreams about Arthur’s death.

There were several things bothering him about that memory, one being that he should’ve been able to do more, act faster and more efficiently to save his friend, and another being that…Arthur had asked Merlin to hold him as he died. Friends didn’t do that. Arthur didn’t act that way with the knights all those times he’d been near death. And so, Merlin kept turning it over and over in his mind, and nothing had stopped his mind from bringing it up every time he fell asleep. Except this glowing liquid hair. He decided to add that to the list of possible properties.

He continued experimenting throughout the day, and at twilight called Archimedes over to investigate the liquid again. Something about the bird had allowed him to enter the portal, and Merlin wanted to observe it. Archimedes had clearly had a poor experience with the substance the night before, however, and flew away from it without investigating further. 

Merlin watched in frustration as the owl pecked at his food, until he had a realization: Archimedes had _pecked_ at the substance. He should’ve known, this was typical behavior for an animal. So he got down on his stomach and leant forward to kiss the pool of liquid. As soon as his nose touched the liquid and started tingling with magic, it felt as though the ground fell away beneath him and he was falling, flailing in a grey sky, hurtling towards a clearing in the woods.

He landed surprisingly softly, but almost fell over at the sight in front of him. Stumbling into the clearing were himself and Arthur. He wasted precious moments in staring at them – at _him_ , his king – but when the pair stumbled and fell, he rushed forward, eager to help. He was being given a second chance. He could change this. 

“Arthur!” he called out, but neither of them heard him - they were panting too loud in pain and exertion. 

“All your magic, Merlin, and you can’t save my life,” Arthur said. 

“I can,” both Merlins said. “I’m not going to lose you.” 

Merlin’s heart wrenched as he sent healing spell after healing spell at Arthur. Arthur, who was pleading with the other Merlin to, “Just – just hold me, please.”

“NO!” he screamed. “Don’t give up, Arthur! He may not be able to save your life but I can, I know more magic now. I’m – I’m from the future, I know things that he doesn’t yet. Just – just hold on, alright? Both of you.” Neither of them showed any signs of hearing him but he knew what they were going through. In that moment, he wouldn't have looked away from Arthur for the world.

He knelt in front of them and placed – tried to place – his hands on Arthur’s chest. But his hands went right through, as if this Arthur were a ghost. 

“N-no,” he whispered. “No. You-you’re here. I can see you. I can hear you…”

“I want to say,” Arthur was saying, “something I’ve never…said to you before… Th-thank you.”

“No.” Merlin stood and wiped ineffectually at his eyes. “I can still fix this. I have to. It’s my d-destiny. O drakon, e male so ftengometta tesd’hup’anankes!” 

But Kilgharrah didn’t appear right away. Instead he waited until the other Merlin called him. When it was too late.

When the other Merlin pulled Arthur onto the dragon’s back, Merlin tried to climb on as well, but Kilgharrah was a ghost as well. He realized there was nothing left for him to do. He couldn’t make Kilgharrah fly faster, he couldn’t do anything to keep Arthur alive until they reached the shore of Avalon, he couldn’t even fly with them.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” he said aloud. “Please, let me go back.” He wasn’t sure who exactly he was pleading with, but it seemed to have worked. He was pulled up into the sky before Kilgharrah took off, and soon he was thrown back onto the floor of his home, crying into the silvery liquid.

*

It took a while for Merlin to find a proper vessel for this ‘dream-stuff’ as he’d been calling it. It needed a wide enough opening to see what was happening without entering the dream, and it would need to be spill-proof and unable to hold anything but the dreams. In the end he carved protective runes into a stone basin and declared it good enough. He used a spare vial to keep the dream of Arthur's death far away from him, but safe if he wanted to see it again. He hadn't dreamt of Arthur's death since he pulled this dream from his head, and it was refreshing to dream of something else, but he suspected that after another three hundred years he would want to revisit it.

His next task was to remove his current dreams of Morgana and save them in glass vials as well. His dreams usually went somewhere along the lines of Morgana barging into his room in Camelot and knowing who and what he was. "Emrys," she would sneer. "The one who is supposed to be my doom. You're nothing but a serving boy."

"I won't let you kill Arthur," he would respond.

"Ah but you won't have a choice if you're dead, now, will you?"

"I can beat you in a battle of magic, Morgana."

"But you can't beat the judicial system of Camelot, can you?" That was the point where Arthur would step out from behind Morgana and sentence him to death for being a sorcerer.

Occasionally he dreamed right through his execution for having magic, Arthur's hardened face the last he saw before he blacked out and woke. 

So naturally, he wanted to get rid of them. 

It was harder than he expected, though, as the last time he had removed a dream it was unintentional. That wasn't to say that it was hard to remove dreams from his mind, _that_ was almost too easy. No, he successfully removed dreams in which he poisoned Morgana and negotiated with Morgause, killed Morgana with Excalibur, was pulled into a corner and threatened by her for surviving the serkets, but not his most frequent dream.

Some time later he was sifting through all of the dreams he had collected and realized that they weren't dreams at all, but memories. Somehow fuller and more real than he remembered, but memories nonetheless. And with three hundred years of life and counting, he was sure to have more than his fair share of memories to store. With any luck it would take him an entire year to catalogue them all.

**Author's Note:**

> This is mostly setup for the next fic in this series (involving a returned Arthur) which will be uploaded at some nebulous time when I finish writing it. I hope you enjoyed it anyway! It demanded to be written before the 'real' story because the Hogwarts Pensieve apparently has modified Saxon runes carved into the side and why shouldn't Merlin, as the greatest wizard ever, create the first Pensieve?
> 
> Comments, kudos and criticism are always welcome!


End file.
